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What Will Smith Can Teach Us About Sales

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In the last ten years, Will Smith has made 10 movies. Of those 10, nine of them hauled in a minimum of $100 million in box office salesapiece.

(Seven Pounds missed the mark by a measly $40 million.)

If you think that his success is by accident, you’re wrong. It’s by educated, researched design.

Many years ago, when Will Smith was preparing to enter the movie industry, he and his manager decided that they didn’t necessarily want to make Oscar winning movies or spirited indie flicks, they wanted to make box office hits. Period.

So they did their research, studied the 10 top grossing movies of all time, and identified the common characteristics.

This is what Will himself said about that research in a 2007 Time Magazine article:

“We looked at (the list) and said, O.K., what are the patterns? We realized that 10 out of 10 had special effects. Nine out of 10 had special effects with creatures. Eight out of 10 had special effects with creatures and a love story.”

So what did he do?

Will Smith made movies with special effects (Bad Boys I & II; I Am Legend), special effects with creatures (Men in Black I & III; Independence Day) and special effects with creatures and a love story (iRobot, MIB II).

And you know what? They were all box office hits.

He threw in the occasional drama (Pursuit of Happyness, Seven Pounds), kids movie (Shark Tale) and sports flick (Ali) to mix things up and suddenly, Will Smith had a booming movie star career.

So what can we learn from Will Smith’s strategy?

Well, if you’ve decided you want to earn a substantial, sustainable income from commercial writing you can use the same three steps Smith used to get there.

SUPER Important Caveat 

There’s nothing wrong with approaching your career from a different perspective. If, for example, you want to produce award-winning literary pieces that’s a great career goal as well.

I’m not at all saying you MUST do it this way.

This method is just for authors who have a goal of a financially beneficial career in writing (and nothing’s wrong with that either). To successfully execute this strategyyou will have to put marketing and sales before your creativity, many authors are not okay with that. You need to know yourself and what you want out of your writing career before you decide to pursue this avenue.

Also keep in mind that once you’ve jumped the hurdle, made some great sales and established a crazy-dedicated fan base, there will be time later in your career to explore your creative side and take more risks (that aren’t necessarily based on marketing research). Check out John Grisham’s career path as an example.

How you can use the Will Smith Strategy

To use the Will Smith approach in your writing career, you need to follow these three easy steps:

1. Research the best-selling books in your genre and find the common denominators.

Pick your genre of choice (YA, science fiction, paranormal, romance, chicklit, etc.) and find out what the top ten best selling books are in that genre.

This is a little harder than it might seem on the surface.

I couldn’t find an all-time best seller list by genre, but this handy tool from USA Today at least lets you sort by genre and pick the week of your choice from anytime over the last several years. Amazon also offers the ability to sort genre lists by popularity.

Once you’ve got your list, you need to figure out what elements these best sellers have in common.

If you’re looking at the science fiction genre for example, do most of the books take place in space? Are they in alternate galaxies or other planets within the Milky Way? Is there a love story? Murder mystery? Aliens?

If more than half of the books you research contain the same element, add it to your list. You should be able to compile a half dozen or so different traits that they all have in common.

From those traits you can begin to form your plot and characters.

2. Put your own spin on it.

By my estimation there are approximately 234,985,047 vampire novels in circulation right now and another 349,062,175 dystopian books to boot (those numbers are rough estimates and probably grossly understate the issue).

The point is, if you’re going to do this right, you have to make yours stand out from the crowd.

This is where your creativity does come into play. You have to step outside the box and find some new elements to mix in with what your sales research has taught you.

Whether it’s a different perspective on an old issue, a new world that has yet to be explored, or the benefit of a completely different and unique writing style, there has to be something different that will make people want to read your book when they’ve already read different ones.

Going back to our Will Smith example, what made all the Men in Black movies ($250 million, $190 million, $178 million respectively) and Independence Day ($306 million)more popular than Battleship ($65 million)?

They all had aliens and special effects, right?

So there was something about the plot or characters that made Will Smith’s movies more popular than the Battleship bomb. (For what it’s worth, I think that comedy had something to do with it — the trailers for all four Smith movies contained snappy one liners while Battleship comes off looking like a Michael Bay rip-off that takes itself too seriously.)

3. Market, market, market your book.

Here’s where the difference between winners and losers is really made.

You can have a great book with great subject matter similar to that of all best sellers, but if nobody knows about it, it doesn’t matter. No Will Smith movie ever hit theaters without you knowing about it at least a month or two in advance, right?

Fortunately, marketing a ready made best-seller based on the popular books in your genre is pretty straightforward. There should be plenty of available arenas where books of that type are heralded, you just need to jump in the game and introduce yourself.

You know I hate to use this example, but that’s how 50 Shades came to be what it is now. It was shared in the Twi-hard fan fiction forums and it spread like an STD (see what I did there?).

So all you need to do is find the forums, blogs and other popular hangouts for fans of the popular books you researched and jump in the game.

Participate in the conversation, make friends and share the details of your book (in that order, please).

What do you think? Would you try it?

So that brings us to the $100 million question — would you try Will Smith’s approach with your writing career?

Certainly $100 million is very near impossible for book sales (unless you’ve got the next Harry Potter series up your sleeve), but with some research in your pocket and great marketing you could surely aim for a very financially successful career.

I’d love to hear some answers from you guys on these questions as well:

  • Do you think it’s a smart move or is it too contrived?
  • Have you researched your genre to find out what seems to be popular?
  • Are there any other elements you’d add to this strategy?

Give us your thoughts in the comments [on the original post at Duolit]!

 

 

This is a reprint from the Duolit blog. Click here to download Duolit’s Free Book Marketing Toolkit.

20 Common Grammar Mistakes That (Almost) Everyone Makes

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This post, by John Gingerich, originally appeared on Lit Reactor on 1/31/12.

I’ve edited a monthly magazine for more than six years, and it’s a job that’s come with more frustration than reward. If there’s one thing I am grateful for — and it sure isn’t the pay — it’s that my work has allowed endless time to hone my craft to Louis Skolnick levels of grammar geekery. 

As someone who slings red ink for a living, let me tell you: grammar is an ultra-micro component in the larger picture; it lies somewhere in the final steps of the editing trail; and as such it’s an overrated quasi-irrelevancy in the creative process, perpetuated into importance primarily by bitter nerds who accumulate tweed jackets and crippling inferiority complexes. But experience has also taught me that readers, for better or worse, will approach your work with a jaundiced eye and an itch to judge. While your grammar shouldn’t be a reflection of your creative powers or writing abilities, let’s face it — it usually is.

Below are 20 common grammar mistakes I see routinely, not only in editorial queries and submissions, but in print: in HR manuals, blogs, magazines, newspapers, trade journals, and even best selling novels. If it makes you feel any better, I’ve made each of these mistakes a hundred times, and I know some of the best authors in history have lived to see these very toadstools appear in print. Let’s hope you can learn from some of their more famous mistakes.

Who and Whom

This one opens a big can of worms. “Who” is a subjective — or nominative — pronoun, along with "he," "she," "it," "we," and "they." It’s used when the pronoun acts as the subject of a clause. “Whom” is an objective pronoun, along with "him," "her," "it", "us," and "them." It’s used when the pronoun acts as the object of a clause. Using “who” or “whom” depends on whether you’re referring to the subject or object of a sentence. When in doubt, substitute “who” with the subjective pronouns “he” or “she,” e.g., Who loves you? cf., He loves me. Similarly, you can also substitute “whom” with the objective pronouns “him” or “her.” e.g., I consulted an attorney whom I met in New York. cf., I consulted him.

Which and That

This is one of the most common mistakes out there, and understandably so. “That” is a restrictive pronoun. It’s vital to the noun to which it’s referring.  e.g., I don’t trust fruits and vegetables that aren’t organic. Here, I’m referring to all non-organic fruits or vegetables. In other words, I only trust fruits and vegetables that are organic. “Which” introduces a relative clause. It allows qualifiers that may not be essential. e.g., I recommend you eat only organic fruits and vegetables, which are available in area grocery stores. In this case, you don’t have to go to a specific grocery store to obtain organic fruits and vegetables. “Which” qualifies, “that” restricts. “Which” is more ambiguous however, and by virtue of its meaning is flexible enough to be used in many restrictive clauses. e.g., The house, which is burning, is mine. e.g., The house that is burning is mine.

Lay and Lie 

This is the crown jewel of all grammatical errors. “Lay” is a transitive verb. It requires a direct subject and one or more objects. Its present tense is “lay” (e.g., I lay the pencil on the table) and its past tense is “laid” (e.g., Yesterday I laid the pencil on the table). “Lie” is an intransitive verb. It needs no object. Its present tense is “lie” (e.g., The Andes mountains lie between Chile and Argentina) and its past tense is “lay” (e.g., The man lay waiting for an ambulance). The most common mistake occurs when the writer uses the past tense of the transitive “lay” (e.g., I laid on the bed) when he/she actually means the intransitive past tense of “lie" (e.g., I lay on the bed).

Moot

Contrary to common misuse, “moot” doesn’t imply something is superfluous. It means a subject is disputable or open to discussion. e.g., The idea that commercial zoning should be allowed in the residential neighborhood was a moot point for the council.

Continual and Continuous

They’re similar, but there’s a difference. “Continual” means something that’s always occurring, with obvious lapses in time. “Continuous” means something continues without any stops or gaps in between. e.g., The continual music next door made it the worst night of studying ever. e.g., Her continuous talking prevented him from concentrating.

Envy and Jealousy

 

Read the rest of the post on Lit Reactor.

Get Over Yourselves

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This post, by J.A. Konrath, originally appeared on his A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing on 9/8/12.

Updated below.

I had a long talk with a friend last night, and we realized something obvious.

Amazon allows one star reviews. 

In other words, the existing system allows and encourages people to publicly trash books.

[Publetariat Editor’s note: strong language after the jump] 

Reread that sentence. Just about every book has one star reviews. So there are, quite literally, MILLIONS of one star reviews.

Every one of those millions of reviewers who trashed a book deliberately did it to harm that book’s sales. That’s the whole point of a one star review. Someone yelling to the world "Don’t buy this!"

This is why I don’t leave one star reviews. I think it is a shitty, mean thing to do.

But it’s allowed.

If it was wrong to trash a book, it wouldn’t be allowed. Like murder isn’t allowed. Our society doesn’t allow murder.

But society does allow people freedom of speech. And that includes the right for people to offer their opinions. Even anonymously. Even stupid opinions. Even biased opinions. Even opinions with agendas.

Recently, three authors were exposed using an existing system–one built upon the very principle of people voicing their opinions–to their advantage, and they’re branded immoral and beyond reproach.

Sorry, no.

Ellory did a shitty thing, and because he didn’t sign his name to his reviews he was also cowardly, but what he did wasn’t any different than what millions of other one star reviewers did and continue to do.

Ellory didn’t want people to buy his rivals’ books. He wanted them to buy his books. That was his agenda.

He’s allowed his agenda. And I’ll defend his right to do things like that, even if I wouldn’t do it.

If I have a bad meal at a restaurant, I’d warn my friends not to go there. I’m deliberately preventing that restaurant from making money. That is my agenda.

And if I warned my friends to avoid a restaurant I never ate at, I’d be doing the same thing, except I’d be a dick.

And if I owned a restaurant, and publicly denounced other restaurants, I’d also be a dick. (Or an advertiser using Pepsi Challenge rules.)

There are dicks on the Internet! Gasp! Circle the wagons, Pa!

As I said, I don’t leave one star reviews. I think trashing books is shitty. That’s my personal opinion.

But if you want to throw Ellory under the bus, you need to condemn the millions of others who give malicious one star reviews, and then condemn the system for allowing it.

If you want to throw Locke under the bus, you need to condemn the millions of others who give unsubstantiated five star reviews, and then condemn the system for allowing it.

If you want to throw Leather under the bus, you need to condemn the millions of others who use sock puppets and post anonymously, and then condemn the system for allowing it.

 

Read the rest of the post on A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing. Also see this rebuttal from Alan Baxter‘s The Word.

Readers Are The Victims of Bad Author Behavior

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This post, by Chuck Wendig, originally appeared on his terribleminds site on 9/10/12.

 

We’re all familiar with the recent spate of bad behavior by authors, right? Writers paying for false five-star reviews. Authors creating fake sock-puppet accounts (or “dick-puppets” as Blackmoore calls ‘em) which they then use to pump up their own work, denigrate the work of others, and act as fake mouthpieces online. Then you have the response, where authors see that bad behavior and respond with their own, leaving one-star reviews as some kind of “Internet country justice.” We’re all clued in, I’m sure, by now.

 

 

My initial reaction to all of this was that it’s a bit inside baseball. It’s authors being dicky and tap-dancing on dubious ethical ground and waggling their penmonkey genitals about in an unpleasant display.

Except then I was online at Amazon (which already is notoriously assy in terms of filter and discoverability) and I was reading reviews and was suddenly struck by the horrifying notion –

I don’t know if these are real.

Suddenly I’m reading reviews with the same level of doubt and suspicion I reserve for reality television (we all realize that ‘House Hunters’ is a big lie, right?). It’s the same vibe I get when I go looking for reviews of restaurants. Locally we had a restaurant where the owner was caught leaving good reviews for himself, bad ones for his competition, and was also getting on forums as a sock-puppet and shouting down folks who said his food had dropped in quality (as it used to be great and isn’t anymore). Shitty behavior, right?

I read reviews for a toaster, my cynical mind flares up like a hot rash: “I’m sure the positive reviews are all left by employees of Big Toaster, and all the negative ones are left by proponents of some Anti-Toaster Coalition.” Casts all reviews in these areas as suspect. Which makes them beyond useless.

Now I’m feeling that way about books.

 

Maybe I should’ve been all along. Maybe I was naive.

It doesn’t change the fact that this isn’t good for anybody.

 

 

Read the rest of the post on terribleminds.

 

Selling Yourself to the Book Industry

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My bookstore’s writers group has asked me to tell them what is needed to present themselves to agents and publishers. What I came up with for an answer was a sample of short bios and elevator synopsis for a fiction and a nonfiction book and a press release. Bios are like good resumes. They are written from the perspective of the agent’s or publisher’s needs, not the author’s.

Here are two samples:

Bio for Senior Citizens’ Self Defense (Nonfiction sample)

Bob Spear, a 67-year-old retired martial artist, holds an 8th Degree Black Belt in the Korean art of Hapkido. An American pioneer in this battlefield defense system, Bob was the first American to obtain a 3rd Degree Black Belt and Instructor’s Certification in Korea. He has trained over 11,000 students throughout the world and eight people are known to have been saved from death or serious injury by his instructions, videos, and books. Now a physically handicapped elder, he understands the concerns of older people and how there are still things they can do to protect themselves.

Bob is well known with a Twitter following of 3,907, a FaceBook following of several hundred, and a Book Trends Blog with 14,080 hits.

Bio for Quad Delta (Fiction sample)

Bob Spear, a Leavenworth, KS resident since 1981, is a retired Military Intelligence professional of twenty-five years. He has written 17 books, five of which are a series of mysteries set in Leavenworth, Kansas. He is Internationally known as a self defense author. Owner of a bookstore located in downtown Leavenworth, he has a keen interest in the underground complex beneath the downtown which provides the setting for his first mystery, Quad Delta.

Bob is well known with a Twitter following of 3,907, a FaceBook following of several hundred, and a Book Trends Blog with 14,080 hits.

Note: Note how the bios are written differently to support the books’ themes. Also, each mentions your platform size in social media.

Imagine walking onto an elevator and finding an agent riding with you. What do you do if he asks, “What’s your book about?” You are getting off at the 10th floor, so that’s how long you have to tell him. These are short explanations that you should have memorized.

Elevator Synopsis for Senior Citizens’ Self Defense (Nonfiction sample)

With a rising crime rate set against an expanding senior citizens’ population, what is an elder to do when suddenly faced with a violent confrontation? This DVD/Training Manual explains the dangers of the streets and the simplest, most effective ways to counter these threats which can be done by anyone, even the handicapped.

Elevator Synopsis for Quad Delta (Fiction sample)

A PTSD -suffering retired Military Intelligence Lieutenant Colonel, Enos Hobson, is dragged into the private investigation world when an old military friend asks him to save his mother and their family fortune from a diabolical Satan worshiping cult that hides its unholy chapel underneath the streets of Leavenworth, KS.

Finally, here is a sample press release. Remember to put the most important things up front.

Sample Press Release for Senior Citizens’ Self Defense

“Old Folks Can Be Deadly”

Local author and self defense trainer Bob Spear says the elderly can defend themselves. With a rising crime rate set against an expanding senior citizens’ population, what is an elder to do when suddenly faced with a violent confrontation? Spear’s DVD/Training Manual program, Senior Citizens’ Self Defense, explains the dangers of the streets and the simplest, most effective ways to counter these threats which can be done by anyone, even the handicapped.

Spear uses true stories to illustrate his program. One describes a confrontation an 83-year-old woman experienced in her rental-assistance apartment in Leavenworth with a night time intruder. He tells about how she used a screwdriver and her common sense to survive the ordeal. Spear says such illustrations are meant to entertain and give confidence to his readers and viewers that they are not helpless.

Bob Spear, a 67-year-old retired martial artist, holds an 8th Degree Black Belt in the Korean art of Hapkido. An American pioneer in this battlefield defense system, Bob was the first American to obtain a 3rd Degree Black Belt and Instructor’s Certification in Korea. He has trained over 11,000 students throughout the world and eight people are known to have been saved from death or serious injury by his instructions, videos, and books. Now a physically handicapped elder, he understands the concerns of older people and how there are still things they can do to protect themselves.

This timely training package is available at The Book Barn at 410 Delaware, Leavenworth, KS 66048.

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I hope you find these tools helpful. 

 

 

This is a cross-posting from Bob Spear‘s Book Trends Blog.

When You Can't Hack It As An Author

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This post, by Michelle Davidson Argyle, originally appeared on her The Innocent Flower blog on 8/31/12.

So this morning when I sat up in bed, I pulled a muscle between my shoulder blades. I probably slept wrong, or something, but this has happened to me before. I was literally in pain for four solid weeks. This time, it doesn’t feel as bad, but it’s still painful. I can’t move my head much. Bending over hurts. Even just sitting still hurts. I know from experience that nothing will help except time and rest. But, crap, I have things I have to get done! 

Oh, well. Pain or no pain, I’ll be writing today. I’m procrastinating at the moment, however, and just spent the last hour and a half browsing through blog links and reading things that make me feel like a terrible marketer, author, and person. You may be asking why, and I’ll tell you it’s because of noise. Constant noise on what we should be doing and not doing.

Elana Johnson wrote a really great post today about focusing on what you do well and letting yourself work productively because of it. After Elana’s post, I browsed around some other posts. There was one about how to write an effective blog post. There was one on how to use Twitter hashtags better. There was one on how often you should blog. The list goes on and on. Every post was effective and helpful, but after awhile, I started to panic.

I’M NOT DOING ANYTHING RIGHT!!!!!!

And this is why I don’t blog much anymore, why I avoid Twitter like the plague, and why I keep posting pictures on Facebook instead of actual status updates. I get into this spot where I feel like I’m doing everything wrong, people are judging me, or they’re annoyed I’m just trying to sell them something, or they think I’m full of myself, and on and on and on. And honestly, I think it’s because of all the posts out there telling me how to do things the right way. They all end up sounding like noise. If I don’t follow certain rules, my career will crumble before my eyes.

#1 – It’s a tough balance writing and selling a product so intimately tied with who you are. 

 

Read the rest of the post on The Innocent Flower.

Your Guide to 11 Kinds of WordPress Blog Pages

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The idea of an author blog is pretty simple, really. As most authors understand it, they write articles around the same topics that are central to their books, market their blogs to people who are interested in those topics, and slowly build an audience, a readership and, hopefully, their writing career.

All this activity arises from the basic unit of blogging—the blog post.

As you blog, each post is stamped with the date it was published, and takes its place in reverse chronological order in your stack of posts.

Your posts might also be available through category or tag searches, or in response to specific searches typed into a search box.

It Isn’t All About Blog Posts

But this is only half the story. WordPress, the popular free and open source blogging software being used by millions of bloggers, makes it just as easy to create pages as to create posts.

What’s the difference between a blog page and a blog post?

Pages are static locations within the hierarchy of your blog. Your pages can have the same kind of branching hierarchy that a static website has, with parent pages and children pages.

Pages stay where they are, while blog posts reside inside the content managment system—the big database—that holds all your articles.

When requested, they are displayed on a single post page that acts as a container within which the article or blog post is shown.

But when it comes to pages, there are quite a few types that can be useful to an author blogger. Many bloggers don’t realize these pages are not difficult to create, and can help with highlighting your books and other offers you make to readers.

What’s important here is that you don’t have to settle for every page—no matter what its function—looking exactly the same. So take a look at some of these different pages and what they are used for.

11 Kinds of Blog Pages

  1. Home page—You don’t have to create this, WordPress does it for you. Your home page is special because you can choose whether to have a static page or your most recent articles shown here by making selections within WordPress’s options. And there are many ways to customize your home page with <a href=" www.thebookdesigner.com="" target="_blank">Home page—You don’t have to create this, WordPress does it for you. Your home page is special because you can choose whether to have a static page or your most recent articles shown here by making selections within WordPress’s options. And there are many ways to customize your home page with plugins and custom-written code.

    2.  

  2. Single-post page—Also generated for you by WordPress to display any one blog post at a time. Like all other automatically-generated pages on your blog, it will have the same header, footer and sidebars you’ve created for the blog.
     
  3. General information pages—I’d put all the other normal pages you create, like your About page, pages about services you offer, guidelines for guest bloggers, competitions, regular blog features like blog carnival pages and so on. Each looks just like the other pages on your blog but the content is fixed.
     
  4. Category pages—When your blog has hundreds of articles, it can be a real advantage for readers to be able to find your posts by category. This makes it very efficient to find articles because you can use your browser’s search function to scan the headlines. Here’s an example of a category page about Book Design.
     
  5. Gallery pages—If you have a lot of paintings, photos, maps or any other graphics to display on your blog, WordPress provides pages that will display them in lots of ways like grids, animated fans, and other formats.
     
  6. Forms pages—These pages exist solely to present a form for readers to fill out, and the most common type is the Contact page. But you can use these for lots of reasons, like taking entries in a contest or submissions to a directory.
     
  7. Landing page—In a sense every page on your blog is a landing page because browsers can arrive there by following a link. But here I’m talking about pages set up to greet people for a specific purpose. An example would be the content landing pages in the Start Here categories in the left sidebar of the blog or the content landing pages on Copyblogger. These are great for helping newcomers find content that’s relevant to their needs, and they are a powerful way to make your content marketing more effective.
     
  8. Squeeze page—Here we come to a special type of blog page, one designed to present an either/or choice to the reader. Squeeze pages typically do away with the sidebars and menu system that’s found on the rest of your blog. Why? To make the binary choice obvious. For instance, I use a squeeze page here to offer my free PDF 10 Things You Need to Know About Self-Publishing in exchange for an email address. You don’t want the reader to have a lot of choices: either put in your email address or click away, that’s the squeeze.
     
  9. Sales pages—This is a variety of the landing page and it’s designed to sell something. Like squeeze pages, it’s really most effective to get rid of distractions on this page because you want readers to concentrate on your sales copy and, if they find it useful, to click your “Buy Now” or “Add to Cart” button. By presenting no distractions, you encourage them to make a choice one way or the other.
     
  10. Automatic pages—These are pages used in the completion of an automatic process of some kind, like sign ups for an email list or an event like a webinar. They might include the confirmation page your email provider sends people to so they know to check their email and confirm their subscription. Or it might be a Thank You page buyers are sent to at the completion of a transaction, and might also include a Download page for delivery of a digital product. In all these cases the pages are used by a process and won’t be seen by anyone else. Here’s an example of a confirmation page with a download included.
     
  11. Module pages—Created by some specialized WordPress themes—special software that modifies how your blog behaves. These automatically create parent/child relationships and a menu hierarchy so you can deliver online training courses or other material that lends itself to being organized into sections or modules. Many membership sites use these, like the Self-Publishing Roadmap.

This list is undoubtedly incomplete, as you can probably create lots of other kinds of pages in WordPress that I haven’t seen.

But as your experience as a blogger grows, you’re going to find more and more things you want to do with your blog, and these specialized pages will be the way you can get things done.

Do you want to sign people up to an email list, run a contest, ask for feedback, organize your content or some other project or goal you have in mind?

reprint from Joel Friedlander‘s The Book Designer.

10 Grammar Mistakes that Can Keep Your Content from Spreading

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This post, by Alexis Grant, originally appeared on Copyblogger.

Ever read a blog post and think, “This writer seems to have some good ideas, but the grammatical errors are driving me crazy”?

(Pro tip: If you don’t ever think this, some of your readers probably do.)

Grammatical glitches make your writing harder to read, and they turn readers off.

Content may be king, but you’ll gain a lot more respect and credibility if your writing is just as brilliant as the ideas you convey.

And by brilliant, I mean clean.

When your writing is clean, readers understand where you’re coming from. And the more your readers understand and respect where you’re coming from, the more likely they are to share your content.

As editor of Brazen Careerist’s blog, Brazen Life, I often see the same errors in submissions for our site. If our smart contributors make these mistakes, chances are you make them sometimes, too.

So next time you write a blog post, whether it’s a guest post or for your own site, check it over for these errors:

1. Using that when you should use who

Whenever you write about people, refer to them using who, not that.

John is the guy who always forgets his shoes, not the guy that always forgets his shoes.

It’s easy to make this mistake because that has become acceptable in everyday conversations. But it’s more noticeable when it’s written down — or maybe it only jumps out to us grammar geeks?

2. Including the word currently in your bio

The word currently is virtually always redundant. (Can you tell this is one of my pet peeves?) But let’s focus on your bio, because that’s where most writers fail on this one.

Don’t write: “Tom Jones is currently a communications director.” If Tom Jones is anything, he’s that at that moment; you don’t need “currently” to clarify.

Just get rid of it.

3. Starting a sentence with There is or There are

This isn’t an actual error, but it’s often a symptom of lazy writing.

There are lots of better, more interesting ways to start sentences.

Ooops. See how easy it is to make this mistake?

Instead of starting a sentence with There is, try turning the phrase around to include a verb or start with you. For example, replace the sentence above with Start your sentences in a more interesting way.

If your copy includes a lot of phrases that begin with there is or there are, put some time into rewriting most of them.

 

Read the rest of the post, which includes 7 additional grammar errors to avoid, on Copyblogger.

25 Things You Should Know About NaNoWriMo

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NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, is held every November. This post, by Chuck Wendig, originally appeared on his terrribleminds site on 10/4/11.

It’s that time of the year, then, that normal everyday men and women get a hankering for the taste of ink and misery, thus choosing to step into the arena to tangle with the NaNoWriMo beast.

Here, then, are 25 of my thoughts regarding this month-long pilgrimage into the mouth of the novel — peruse, digest, then discuss. Feel free to hit the comments [on the original post] and add your own thoughts to the tangle.

[Publetariat Editor’s Note: strong language after the jump]

1. Writing Requires Writing

The oft-repeated refrain, “Writers write,” is as true a sentiment as one can find, and yet so many self-declared writers seem to ignore it just the same. National Novel Writing Month — NaNoWriMo, which sounds like like the more formalized greeting used by Mork when calling home to Ork — demands that writers shit or get off the pot. It says, you’re a writer, so get to scrawling, motherfucker.

2. Writing Requires Finishing

The other giant sucking chest wound that afflicts a great many so-called writers is the inability to finish a single fucking thing. Not a novel, not a script, not a short story. (One wonders how many unfinished manuscripts sit collecting dust like a shelf full of Hummel figurines in an old cat lady’s decrepit Victorian manse.) NaNoWriMo lays down the law: you have a goal and that goal is to finish.

3. Discipline, With A Capital “Do That Shit Every Day, Son”

The way you survive NaNoWriMo is the same way any novelist survives: by spot-welding one’s ass to the office chair every day and putting the words to screen and paper no matter what. Got a headache? Better write. Kid won’t stop crying? Better write. Life is hard and weepy-pissy-sadfaced-panda-noises? Fuck you and write. Covered in killer bees? Maybe today’s not the best day to write. You might want to call somebody. Just don’t pee in fear. Bees can smell fear-urine. Pee is to bees as catnip is to cats.

4. The Magic Number Is 1666

Ahh. The Devil’s vintage. Ahem. Anyway. To hit 50,000 words in one month, you must write at least 1,666 words per day over the 30 day period. I write about 1000 words in an hour, so you’re probably looking at two to three hours worth of work per day. If you choose to not work weekends, you’ll probably need to hit around 2300 words per day. If you’re only working weekends, then ~6000 per day.

5. The Problem With 50,000 Words

Be advised: 50,000 words does not a novel make. It may technically count, but publishers don’t want to hear it. Even in the young adult market I’d say that most novels hover around 60,000 words. You go to a publisher with 50k in hand and call it a novel, they’re going to laugh at you. And whip your naked ass with a towel. And put that shit on YouTube so everybody can have a chortle or three. Someone out there is surely saying, “Yes, but what if I’m self-publishing?” Oh, don’t worry, you intrepid DIY’ers. I’ll get to you.

6. The True Nature Of “Finishing”

For the record, I’m not a fan of referring to one’s sexual climax as “finishing.” It’s so… final. “I have finished. I am complete. Snooze Mode, engaged!” I prefer “arrived.” Sounds so much more festive! As if there’s more on the way! This party’s just getting started! … wait, I’m talking about the wrong type of finishing, aren’t I? Hm. Damn. Ah, yes, NaNoWriMo. Writing 50,000 words is your technical goal — completing a novel in those 50,000 words is not. You can turn in an unfinished novel and be good to go. The only concern there is that 50,000 words serves only as a milestone and come December it again becomes oh-so-easy to settle in with the “I’ve Written Part Of A Novel” crowd. Always remember: the only way through is through.

7. Draft Zero

It helps to look at your NaNoWriMo novel as the zero draft — it has a beginning, it has an ending, it has a whole lot of something in the middle. The puzzle pieces are all on the table and, at the very least, you’ve got an image starting to come together (“is that a dolphin riding side-saddle on a mechanical warhorse through a hail of lasers?”). But the zero draft isn’t done cooking. A proper first draft awaits. A first draft that will see more meat slapped onto those exposed bones, taking your word count into more realistic territory.

8. Quantity Above Quality

Put differently, the end result of any written novel is quality. You’re looking for that thing to shine like a stiletto and be just as sharp. NaNoWriMo doesn’t ask for or judge quality as part of its end goal. To “win” the month, you could theoretically write the phrase “nipple sandwich” 25,000 times and earn yourself a little certificate. Quantity must be spun into quality. You’ve got all the sticks. Now build yourself a house.

9. Beware “Win” Conditions

If you complete NaNoWriMo, I give you permission to feel like a winner. If you don’t, I do not — repeat, awooga, awooga, do not — give you permission to feel like a loser. This is one of the perils of the gamification of novel-writing, the belief that by racking up a certain score (word count) in a pre-set time-frame (one month for everybody), you win. And by not doing this, well, fuck you, put another quarter in the machine, dongface. Which leads me to:

10. We’re Not All Robots Who Follow The Same Pre-Described Program

NaNoWriMo assumes a single way of writing a novel. Part of this equation — “smash brain against keyboard until story bleeds out” — is fairly universal. The rest is not. For every novelist comes a new path cut through the jungle. Some novelists write 1000 words a day. Some 5000 words a day. Some spend more time on planning, others spend a year or more writing. Be advised that NaNoWriMo is not a guaranteed solution, nor is your “failure to thrive” in that program in any way meaningful. I tried it years back and found it just didn’t fit for me. (And yet I remain!) It is not a bellwether of your ability or talent.

 

Read the rest of the post, which contains 15 more things to know about NaNoWriMo, on terribleminds.

What Offer Does Your Author Blog Make?

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It seems that authors fall into two categories when it comes to author blogging:

  1. Authors who are blogging regularly
  2. Authors who think they should be blogging regularly

If you read blogs you come to the conclusion that there are lots of reasons authors are blogging. But sometimes I wonder whether authors have thought about the reason they are blogging—why their blog exists.

 

Now, admittedly there are lots of kinds of author blogs.

There’s a big divide between fiction authors who blog and nonfiction authors. And within nonfiction, there’s a big difference between the kind of blog you can develop if you write literary criticism or medieval history, or if you write about how to get rid of the weeds in your garden or how to make great vegan dishes.

So every author is different, and our subjects and audiences are infinitely varied.

But having some clarity about what purpose your blog serves can really help you achieve your goals. Even better, being able to sum it up in just a few words—why readers would bother to stop there and read it—is one of the best early exercises for new bloggers.

The Magic of the Tagline

When you decide to start a blog, you have to right away come up with a name for it. Or you can blog under your own name, on the “domain-name-of-your-author-name” plan.

No matter what domain name you end up with, you’ll notice that most blogs have a tagline, a bit like a book’s subtitle.

For instance, here are some taglines from blogs I visit:

  • The Creative Penn: Helping you write, publish and market your book
  • The Passive Voice: Writers, Writing, Publishing, Disruptive Innovation and the Universe
  • Writer Unboxed: about the craft and business of fiction
  • Copyblogger: Content Marketing Solutions for WordPress that Work
  • Social Media Examiner: Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
  • We Grow Media: Helping Writers & Publishers Make an Impact and Build Their Legacies

In each case, the blogger has tried to sum up the value of the blog to the reader.

Creating the Tagline for Your Blog

Doing this exercise was a lot more difficult for me than I thought it would be. I already had the name of the blog—thebookdesigner.com—so that wasn’t a problem.

But it took several hours and a lot of thought before I arrived at the tagline. But going through that work was also very valuable, and I recommend this exercise to every author who is setting up, or reviving, a blog.

You can see my own end result in the masthead: practical advice to help build better books.

And no matter how far afield the articles here have wandered, this statement hasn’t changed, because my offer has never changed.

If you think about it, how well you fulfill the promise of this statement will have a lot to do with the success of your blog. And if it does succeed, it can become a vehicle capable of supporting your writing and publishing efforts, the ultimate foundation of your author platform.

We blog at the permission of our readers, and the exercise of creating a tagline for your blog is one of the best ways to focus on exactly what your offer is to your readers.

And it gives you the chance to see how well you’re fulfilling that offer.

What offer do you make to your readers through your blog? Have you thought about that?


This is a reprint from Joel Friedlander‘s The Book Designer.

Writer Aids

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This blog article features various software packages from one company, Mariner Software, Inc. It’s not meant as an advertisement but an evaluation of tools I use because I find them to be the best out there. They deliver what they promise. I decided to write this because I’ve been asked to be a beta tester for a new upcoming package called “Persona.” Here is what they intend for it to do:

With Persona, you will be able to:

  • Create the cast for your story
  • Explore the relationships and interactions between each of the characters
  • Categorize each character into one of 32 archetypes and 64 styles
  • Create Smart Groups of characters based on attributes like tags, type, sex, or any word or phrase from your notes
  • Create adhoc groups of characters without a defined relationship so you can explore their interactions
  • See the relationships between archetypes, for example, if your hero is corrupted and becomes a villain

This is the best answer I have seen for an old warhorse of a writers aid called “Dramatica,” which is based on a complex, almost incomprehensible writing theory. Persona is a combination of a character data base and a collection of archetypical types and their motivations and typical actions. It is, as I said, still in beta testing, but should be out soon. Here are some other products that I use which you should find helpful:

Contour—$49.95 Mac/Windows

This was designed for screenwriters, but I have found it to be extremely helpful for novel writing. It starts out by asking these 4 questions: Who is the main character? What is the main character trying to accomplish? Who is trying to stop the main character? What happens if the main character fails? From there it goes on to ask questions throughout the structure of a typical story that, if an author answers the questions, will give him or her a logical progression of the story. Contour, the proven story development system developed by Emmy Award-nominated Jeffrey Alan Schechter, is designed to take your idea and turn it into a solid outline – the same kind of character-based structure used by many of the biggest blockbuster movies. In the company’s words: Unlike other story development systems which are either so complicated that you don’t know where to start or so light-weight as to wonder, “why in the world did I buy this?”, Contour is a must-have for every screenwriter. Taking your idea and using a fill-in-the blanks and intuitive approach, Contour guides you as to what elements need to be part of your story outline – you’re never left to wonder, “what comes next?”

StoryMill 4.0—$49.95  Mac

I love this aid and use it a lot. Here are the company’s description of what it does:

The Easiest, Most Complete Novel Writing Software Ever.

Writing a great novel doesn’t just happen, it is designed. It is thought out. It takes a writer who has discipline, creativity and open-mindedness. Writing is a creative process and like all creative processes, sometimes it’s hard to get started. But ask any writer, once you get into “the zone” you can write forever.
Take your idea for mystery, romance, adventure, action or science fiction and turn it into that novel you know is within but just needs a little help getting out. Developed to ease a person into the writing experience, StoryMill 4 is purposely designed to include all the essential writing elements, while at the same time maintaining an intuitive user interface.
StoryMill is incredibly flexible – use it as your no-nonsense place to write and revise using its distraction-free full screen and powerful annotations, or as your complete database of every character, location and scene that makes up your novel. You can set a daily writing goal and keep track of it using the Progress Meter. There are handy things to help you keep track of cliches and monitor how many times you use a word. There’s a single place for all your research – add pictures, tags, files and links, or make notes to any item in your project. It’s all right there within easy reach.

Have Timeline, will travel
The Timeline View is all new. You can group the scenes so you can see the relationship between them. Change the unit of time measurement all the way from minutes to centuries. Insert scenes or events and view the list of untimed scenes. No matter what passage of time your story takes, the Timeline View will give you a perspective unique only to StoryMill.

Conclusion

If you need writing software that can help you think through the creative process, develop the elements of your story, its characters, its scenes, its time lines, and its research, these packages are invaluable. Their costs are reasonable.

 

This is a cross-posting from Bob Spear‘s Book Trends blog.

The Future of Publishing 2020: John Reed | Publishing Perspectives

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Publishing Perspectives takes a reflective look over the past ten years of publishing through the eyes of John Reed, a books editor at Brooklyn Rail and also an esoterical US author of a number of novels during this period. His current novel, Snowball’s Chance, was published by a little-know literary press in 2002 and this year was republished by Melville House Books. Reed, in his article for Publishing Perspectives—Publishing in 2002 vs 2012: Better, Worse or a Stalemate?—goes as far as drawing up a chart to try and evaluate the changes. Reed’s conclusions – if you want to call them that – are of course somewhat subjective and based upon his experiences of the publishing world and the journey of one book through a passage of ten years.

 

The short article by Reed piqued my interest because I’ve been writing a series of extensive articles this year on The Future of Publishing 2020 and you cannot look forward into the coming ten years of publishing without continually glancing over your shoulder into the past. What struck me most about writing the 2020 articles is the realisation that it is a precarious business to label what is ‘better’ or ‘worse’ now and then.

PP’s Editor-in-Chief, Edward Nawotka, summaries Reed’s chart with the following:

Better in 2002: Big Presses, Distribution, Democracy of Literature, Book Coverage, Literature in Education and Copyright.


Better in 2012: Small Presses, Online Book Sales, The Writing Itself, Readership, Self-publishing, Literary Culture and Parody.

Stalemate: Editorial, State of Narrative, Economy of Writers.

While I am in broad agreement with this summary, there are a few things that could be highly debatable. Reed himself says that the kind of editing work carried out on Snowball’s Chance in 2002 is not something we would see from a small or big press today. Therein is at least one reason why I would argue that editing is probably—on the whole—worse today than it was in 2002. The scales weighing curation and nurturing talent against commercial investment, speed to market and success has long tipped in favour of the latter. Publishers’ sales and marketing departments have a greater say in what leaves the front door of the house more than ever before, but it still holds firm to a production proccess with a twelve to eighteen month span. The growth in cottage and small presses and self-publishing has attempted to counter the balance of the scales, and this has led to basement rooms filled with literary champions, cultural zealots, and authors taking a turn in the editorial and publishing chairs. They all beaver away into the twilight hours—some content to smother their lack of publishing know-how with sheer passion. But this is the price of opportunity in the new publishing landscape.

The next part in my series on The Future of Publishing 2020 will focus on discoverability. Is readership better today than it was ten years ago and will it grow in the next ten years? Readership and audience reach for an author are tied inevitably to discoverability. How do you define what readership is? I think there are more people reading today than ever before, but we need to understand what it is they are reading and why they are reading it, rather than assuming readership is about books alone. Only then can we truly evaluate what it is we mean when we talk about readership and how much books have a role to play. This may ultimately prove to be the greatest challenge for publishers in the years ahead—moving from simply being producers of books to content managers.


Reed describes Amazon as being ‘a book and crap bazaar’ in 2002, and despite the millions of dollars Amazon has poured into investment in algorithms, search and marketing tools, the more cynical might argue what has really changed in the intervening years. What has changed is that the reader—faced with a greater sea of choice—now has the task of sorting the wheat from the chaff with whatever discoverability tools are to hand.

"In 2002, you went to the bookstore and looked around. Now, people make their choices, and their choices are influenced by what they see online. Those who are able to resist the constant temptation of propaganda and idiocy are able to employ the internet to inform themselves on subjects of interest and personal aesthetics. It’s that population of people—among the what? six million writers?— that has raised the overall quality of U.S. creative writing. With distribution as is, however, there’s not much evidence of that in the marketplace."

I would add one caveat to Reed’s Publishing Perspectives article, and perhaps it touches on what he calls ‘the economy of writers’—and that for me is a case of quantity over quality. Reed sees the economy of writers as a stalemate right now, but I think we will see this get worse. Just as readership has grown—whether you define it as reading a book or no more than reading the daily news on your iPad every evening—more readers are becoming writers in the new publishing landscape of opportunity. The pie is not getting any bigger in relative terms.

"In 2020, more than 80% of authors will operate independently and will control and manage their entire writing output with less than a quarter earning a full time living. The remaining 20% will be a combination of writers from national writing academies, independent publishing cooperatives and publishing houses owned by media /agency companies." 

From: The Future of Publishing 2020: Control or (Jeff Bezos stole all my books and ate all the hamsters!)  

 

This is a cross-posting from Mick Rooney‘s The Independent Publishing Magazine.

26 Indispensable Writing Tips From Famous Authors

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This post, by Jack Shepherd, originally appeared on BuzzFeed.

1. Ernest Hemingway:

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

2. Elmore Leonard:

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

3. Anton Chekov:

Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

4. George Orwell:

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

Never use a long word where a short one will do.

If it is possible to cut a word out, cut it out.

Never use the passive where you can use the active.

Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

Break any of these rules sooner than saying anything outright barbarous.

 

Read the rest of the post, which includes additional tips from 24 more great authors (and some great photos of the authors, which we can’t share here due to copyright) on BuzzFeed.

C. S. Lewis, Mastermind.

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This post, by Gerry McCullough, originally appeared on her blog.

I wonder when I first heard of C.S.Lewis?

I think it must have been when a friend of mine at school (I’d known her since my first day at primary school, and on through Grammar School and University, before eventually losing touch. Anne Stirling, now Anne Salmon, where are you?) spoke enthusiastically about, and then lent me, The Screwtape Letters. I enjoyed reading it, and began to look out for other books by this author.

For whatever reason, I didn’t at first find and read the Narnia series. I am an avid reader of children’s books, and have been from my childhood and teens, when this is obviously more normal, on through my twenties, thirties and so on. But I was eighteen before (again) someone lent me The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. I loved it straight away, and bought and read the other six books rapidly.

I love the Narnia books, I even love the slightly distorted films. Well, they’re better than many films of well-loved books. And when I take a notion to re-read a children’s book from my past these days, although it may be one by Geoffrey Trease, Nancy Breary, Arthur Ransom, or a dozen other favourites, as often as not it’s a Narnia book. My special favourites are The Horse and his Boy, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and The Silver Chair. Now I come to think about it, these are all books about a journey of adventure (did Enid Blyton write one of her adventure series with that title? I think she did. I always loved her adventure books. Oh, and The Magic Faraway Tree.)

Have you ever thought how much Lewis drew from another firm favourite of mine, E. Nesbit? In the opening of The Magician’s Nephew, he says that the story (set back in time from the rest of the series) happened, ‘when the Bastables were still seeking for treasure in the Lewisham Road.’ Now, there’s a clue!

I read an excerpt from The Treasure Seekers by E. Nesbit when I was at Primary School, in a book which included bits from Little Women and Three Men in a Boat, etc. (It’s amazing how many of my favourite writers I first heard of in that selection.) After that I searched out Nesbit’s books in the Junior Library, finding, first of all, The House of Arden, the first Time Travelling book I ever read, and certainly one of the best. Lewis could have chosen no more evocative, magical opening to The Magician’s Nephew than that reference, from my point of view.

 

Read the rest of the post on Gerry McCullough’s blog.

Selling Books: The Only Guide You'll Ever Need

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Originally appeared as Selling Books: The Only Guide You’ll Ever Need on LiveHacked.com.

 

Note: This post is really long. I believe it’s pretty darn good, and there’s lots of information in it. If there’s one post I’ve ever written that truly sums up my thoughts on writing, books, and making money from them, this is it. Here we go! Since I’ve started this blog, I’ve grown a highly-targeted email list, gained attention in a crowded niche (writing and productivity), and have been able to correspond directly with literally hundreds of people. I’m not famous, and didn’t start by being well-known. In fact, if you would have Googled me six months ago, you’d have found my Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ pages, maybe my personal blog (now pointing to this one), and another dude with the same name as me who sings Backstreet Boys, albeit not well. Basically, I was a nobody.  Sure–I’m certainly not "famous" now, by anyone’s standards, nor have I become some sort of sage or guru. But I’ve definitely made an impact online, and the numbers don’t seem to be slowing down. There are lots of benefits to this sort of "impact," not the least of which is gaining attention and mindshare in a crowded world. For me, though, the best value I’ve received is having been able to help so many other people with their writing, business, and "platform building" online. …And, I’ve had a few book sales, to boot. That’s what this post is about I hope you’re writing for more than just making money. Selling a book is a great way to get your name out there, or promote an idea or mindset, and it can certainly lead to earning more money for yourself as well. Money’s a great thing, used wisely and for the right purposes, but it’s certainly not why most writers and creators are artists. That said, you do need money–either to spend on your family and lifestyle, or to reinvest into your writing business. Whatever the reason, I’ve been getting more and more questions lately about the writing + book sales dilemma. Most writers want to sell their books, and lots of them. But they have a (justified) hesitation when it comes to self-promotion, marketing, and spending hours and days on things other than writing. And I’ve harped on it enough to know that just writing and waiting is sort of a luck-based scenario. If you’ve been reading this blog for any amount of time, you’ll know that I believe in building platforms online, and these platforms help to promote us and get more books sold. The problem In a nutshell, the problem with this philosophy is that it’s unspecific. You might understand the concept of building a platform, attracting people to it, and then hyping your product, but you might not understand the intricacies of how it all works. For example, here are some questions I’ve been getting over and over again in my email inbox, in the comments section of some posts, and on guest posts I’ve written around the web:

  • I write fiction, not nonfiction. How can I blog and still sell fiction?
  • I don’t want to write about my life or other nonfiction stuff–how can I write a fiction blog that sells books?
  • How can I sell more of my books without a big publishing deal?
  • How much does it cost to build a solid platform online?

This post will hopefully answer some of these questions. Step 1: Ask the Right Questions First, though, it’s important to make sure you’re asking the right questions. Questions like, "how do I sell more books," or "how many books do  I need to sell to quit my day job?" These questions aren’t bad, they’re just too early in the process of building a platform. The first, most obvious, and most-forgotten question is WHY.

  • Why do you want to build a platform?
  • Why you? Why not someone else?
  • What do you hope to gain from your platform?
  • What do you want others to gain from your platform?

These questions are the "business plan"-type questions that are all related to vision. Vision is a fleeting, hard-to-capture entity that dances in our dreams and makes our mouth water, but it’s not something we usually write down on a piece of paper. For some people, the vision questions (and their corresponding answers) lack clarity, specificity, and action-based steps, so they ignore it, opting instead to "just have it in my head." I can tell you from experience that "just having your vision in your head" is way different than having it written out in perfectly clear sentence form. I’ve launched a few businesses and blogs, and the ones that had a chance of succeeding were the ones that I spent time working on a vision for. Note: Here’s a secret, though. The really good visions aren’t ones we usually have to think too long or hard about–they’re already floating through our heads and in our minds. We just need to actually write them down.  What if your vision is just "to be a writer"? That’s a good question–and the answer is that it’s really not your vision, it’s just the method you want to use to get to your vision. Your real vision is something like:

  • To provide a new, fresh perspective on modern-day cultural changes in humanity, provided through writing and blogging
  • To offer a style of horror novels that inspire, teach, and guide young adults into adulthood
  • To change the way the world views life in third-world countries by writing personal first-person accounts and testaments of the men and women who live there

Do you see the difference? These "vision statements" are bigger–much bigger than, "to be a writer." Your vision can change, and it often does, but it needs to be something big, lofty, and "change-the-world"-y. So again, ask yourself the right questions and come up with a vision you can stick to for awhile. If you need help with these questions, I’ve written an entire book giving them to you (101 in all), and you can grab it here. Step 2: Build A Platform Once you know the right questions, you’ll know the right answers. You’ve been around long enough to have heard all of the ins and outs of what you do, and you’ve read enough about it and studied it long enough. In other words, you’ve read so many answers that all you need to do is figure out the right questions, ask them, and then let your mind answer them the way you know is right. I realized long ago that my platform was going to be successful only if I provided a solid value to other people, first and foremost. Building a business on affiliate programs and product sales was one of the many "answers" floating around on the web, but for me the "right answer" was more about writing for other people and listening to their concerns, and then helping when I could. So, how do you build a platform? You start by figuring out your value. What are you going to offer me that’s going to save me time, earn me more money, entertain or enlighten me, or give me something to think about? You can pick any of these things, but the secret to providing value is doing it well enough that I’ll want to come back later. Platforms range in all shapes and sizes, but the ones we’ll talk about (because that’s what I’m trained to talk about and what I know how to build) are those platforms that are built and grown online, using technology like social media and blogging, and are teaching-based and product (books)-based. This website is a good example of that kind of platform. And here are instructions for building one:

  • Set up a home base. Your "Home Base" is a website, preferably a blog, that will act as your online start and endpoint to everything you do. You don’t need to spend forever building this Home Base, but you do need to take some time to get it right. Here are a few posts describing this process in more detail. Use Google Analytics to track your Home Base’s activity.
  • Set up your outposts. Like your Home Base, these "Outposts" are websites, but they’re usually owned and controlled by someone else. Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are all Outposts, and they should all be set up with one and only one goal in mind: Get people to click through to your Home Base.
  • Start promoting. Use the "Slow-Drip Marketing Method" to promote other peoples’ content most of the time, and your own stuff a much smaller portion of the time. Don’t be afraid to promote your own stuff if you’re promoting other stuff most often. Shoot for an 80/20 ratio of promoting other content versus promoting your own. Figure out how to promote almost on autopilot, so you can focus on the next step.
  • Start writing. Actually, you’ll be writing throughout this entire process. You are a writer, so this shouldn’t be difficult. Specifically, you need to write about things people want to read about, and don’t be afraid to try out new things. Again, get this on autopilot (blog every Tuesday and Thursday, for example, no matter what), and then start writing other things, like guest posts, manifestos, and books.

Tweak as you go, adding/subtracting/changing/whatever until you feel like your platform is looking polished and running like a well-oiled machine. Once you get to the point where you don’t need to actively be working on your blog’s theme, widgets, and plugins, use that energy to write more and broaden your horizons. Once you’ve started writing more, measure the results of everything you do, which is the next step. Step 3: Measure and Improve What gets measured gets managed. You don’t want to micromanage for too long, though, or you’ll get analysis paralysis and burn out. However, don’t use that excuse to not track what your efforts are leading to. Here are some key points:

  • Watch Google Analytics data on your Home Base and track things like Bounce Rate, which pages are bringing in the most visitors, and where your visitors are coming from.
  • If you’re using WordPress, install Pretty Links and set up some "pretty links" on your site. An example is the link I use for my new book: www.livehacked.com/blogging-101, which is a "pretty" link that just sends you on to Amazon–but it also tracks how many clicks there are on it, and now Analytics can track it as well. If you’re not using WordPress, start. If you won’t, then I guess you can use gaconfig.com.
  • Using the data you’re starting to measure, tweak things on your Home Base to hopefully improve them.

The formula for all of this is build-measure-tweak-repeat, over and over again. It’s not fancy, pretty, or even fun sometimes, but it works. Having a vision that excites and invigorates you is going to help you run with this formula without getting sick to your stomach. "If you fail to plan, you plan to fail." Alright–that covers it! Wait–you thought I was going to give you a top-secret recipe for selling loads of books? Well, I can’t do that–but what I can do is help you figure out how you, as a horror/romance/memoir/investing author, can actually get people to pay attention to you and take the time out to visit that awesome platform you’re building. There are a few tried-and-true methods in the industry that still work, and probably always will. Pick one of them if you want:

  1. Writing about writing. Companies like Writer’s Digest do this very well, and probably make a killing. The goal is to teach other writers about the craft and business of writing, and sell them products, services, and books that further help them. LiveHacked is doing this to some extent.
  2. Writing about yourself. Memoir writers and some other nonfiction authors can usually do this pretty well. Basically, you’re blogging about yourself, your life, your cat, your kids; whatever. It can sometimes be more difficult to make a long-term career out of this style, unless you have a large catalog of your work for sale or you have a bestseller or two.
  3. Writing about your fiction. Every now and then, I’ll come across a blog that’s just a mashup of an author’s fiction–blog posts are really snippets of short stories, character shorts, or serialized books (one chapter or section each day/week). If you want to sell books like this, you might try starting with releasing your book as serial fiction, one post every other day or so. This way, you can "set it and forget it" while you work on your next novel and promote the blog.
  4. Writing about your subject matter. This one’s cool, but it’s difficult. Basically, you’re writing nonfiction blog posts about your fiction’s subject matter. Let’s say you write a novel about a wizard kid who has to defeat He Who Shall Not Be Named. You might write a few posts about the history of wizardry, maybe another few on castles, and some on fantasy in general. You can certainly build a successful platform, but be careful when you try to turn around and write a Tom Clancy-esque military novel–that might need another platform (or pen name) altogether!

I hope all of this makes sense–blogging and platform building is not as much about the subject matter (what you’re blogging about) as it is about to whom you’re offering it. If you can figure out a subset of your demographic that really loves the stuff you blog about, it doesn’t really matter if it’s related to your book’s subject or not. WHAT?!? Yeah, okay, I said it. If you can build a great, successful, and popular platform, your readers and fans will buy your book.  They might not all buy it, but don’t think that just because they like reading your blog about military history, they won’t like reading your YA fan fiction. If you’re building a platform correctly, people will know you as a good writer, not just as a niche-focused writer. An example Trent Hamm, a very popular blogger, is known primarily (and almost exclusively) for his blog, TheSimpleDollar. He’s written so many blog posts on personal finance and helped so many people find financial answers, it came as sort of a shock to me when he announced that his next book (after his first, called The Simple Dollar) would be a novel.  Huh? That’s right–a novel. I don’t know what it’s about, but I know that I’ll buy it. Part of it is just trying to support the guy–hey, I love his work–and the other part of it is that I know he’s a great writer, and even if the book’s a flop, it’ll be like having a friend’s book on my bookshelf. I’m pretty sure that there are about 100,000 other readers of The Simple Dollar who feel the same way. Last thing–let me paint a picture There’s one other way I can illustrate this. I had a comment from a reader not too long ago asking (basically), "how can I promote and blog about nonfiction stuff, and expect these readers to buy my fiction?" It’s a good question, and it warrants a good answer. So here’s my best shot: Imagine you’re at home, having a nice dinner with a friend, whom you know through work. You often exchange work-related ideas, and help each other on projects and such. After dinner, you start watching TV, and the friend says, "hey, man, is this book on the coffee table yours?"  You of course reply, "Yup! I wrote it last year–I’d love for you to read it, but I don’t have another copy here." They will, no doubt, say, "Oh please! Just tell me where to get it! Is it available on Amazon? I’m more than happy to help you out!" You’ve just sold a novel to a "nonfiction friend" (does that analogy make sense?). There will be some friends who congratulate you and pat you on the back, but who never actually buy the book. There are also people who read only one book per year (usually Harry Potter, Twilight or Hunger Games, etc.), so you can’t really expect them to read yours, too. The point The point, if you’re still following along, is that this little parable of The Friend in Your Living Room is really People Who Read Your Blog. Your "living room" is your "Home Base," and the "friend" whom you invite over is the reader whom you attract through your platform-building efforts. Keep plugging away at your platform, and there will be more and more friends in your living room. The end.  I’m really sorry this post ended up so long–thanks for holding on there with me, and if I can ask one more favor–let me know what you thought. Leave a comment, and add your thoughts on the subject!